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The Most Important Obscure Languages?
Nerval's Lobster writes: If you're a programmer, you're knowledgeable about "big" languages such as Java and C++. But what about those little-known languages you only hear about occasionally? Which ones have an impact on the world that belies their obscurity? Erlang (used in high-performance, parallel systems) springs immediately to mind, as does R, which is relied upon my mathematicians and analysts to crunch all sorts of data. But surely there are a handful of others, used only by a subset of people, that nonetheless inform large and important platforms that lots of people rely upon... without realizing what they owe to a language that few have ever heard of.
I might go with a more exotic language, like Haskell or Mercury. D and Scala aren't as big as C++, but they're not conceptually that different. (That's not to say they're not worthwhile, mind.) Languages like Haskell, Mercury, Prolog, Erlang, are rather more alien.
I guess my real point is that most important isn't terribly precise.
I rather like BF. It's a very compact language with 8 instructions total, so it's usefulness to implement useful software is pretty limited. By pretty limited I mean 0. However, the language itself, being 8 instructions and some implied state, is pretty trivial to implement. It is also Turning complete. So it ends up being a great mechanism to prove another language is Turning complete by implementing a BF interpreter with it. So no one wants to actually use it, there is a small number of people who know about it, and it is very utilitarian in a meta context. Best obscure language.
The syntax is too obscure for most mainstream programmers.